By Hans Bader
Crucial offers to help clean up BP’s oil spill “have come from Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian firms that… possess some of the world’s most advanced oil skimming ships.” But the Obama administration wouldn’t accept the help, because doing so would require it to do something past presidents have routinely done: waive rules imposed by the Jones Act, a law backed by unions.
The law itself permits the president to waive these requirements, and such waivers were “granted, promptly, by the Bush administration,” in the aftermath of hurricanes and other emergencies. But Obama has refused to do so, notes David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen:
“The BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed. So...the U.S. Coast Guard...can’t accept, and therefore don’t ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.”
Instead, Obama rejected a Dutch offer to help clean up the spill, noted Voice of America News:
“The Obama administration declined the Dutch offer partly because of the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from certain activities in U.S. waters. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis five years ago, the Bush administration waived the Jones Act in order to facilitate some foreign assistance, but such a waiver was not given in this case.
“After the Obama administration refused help from the Netherlands, Geert Visser, the consul general for the Netherlands in Houston, told Loren Steffy: “Let’s forget about politics; let’s get it done.’” But for Obama, politics always comes first: “The explanation of Obama’s reluctance to seek this remedy is his cozy relationship with labor unions...’The unions see it [not waiving the act] as protecting jobs. They hate when the Jones Act gets waived.’”
Ironically, even the staunchest supporters of the Jones Act are now distancing themselves from refusals to accept foreign help, saying they have “not and will not stand in the way of the use of these well-established waiver procedures to address this crisis.” Obama is being more intransigently pro-union than the unions themselves.
One can only hope Obama will change his mind now, given that “Each day our European allies are prevented from helping us speed up the clean up is
another day that Gulf fishing and tourism jobs die.”
(The Obama administration has belatedly accepted some foreign equipment for use in fighting the spill, although it still blocks ships with foreign crews. As Voice of America notes, although “the Netherlands offered help in April,” such as providing “sophisticated” oil “skimmers and dredging devices,” the Obama administration blocked their crews from working in U.S. waters, and as a result, this crucial “operation was delayed until U.S. crews could be trained” in June. “The Dutch also offered assistance with building sand berms (barriers) along the coast of Louisiana to protect sensitive marshlands, but that offer was also rejected, even though Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had been requesting such protective barriers.")
In April 2009, the Obama administration granted BP, a big supporter of Obama, a waiver of environmental regulations. But after the oil spill, it blocked Louisiana from protecting its coastline against the oil spill by delaying rather than expediting regulatory approval of essential protective measures. It has also chosen not to use what has been described as “the most effective method” of fighting the spill, a method successfully used in other oil spills. Democratic strategist James Carville called Obama’s handling of the oil spill “lackadaisical” and “unbelievable” in its “stupidity.”
Obama is now using BP’s oil spill to push the global-warming legislation that BP had lobbied for. Obama’s global warming legislation expands ethanol subsidies, which cause famine, starvation, and food riots in poor countries by shrinking the food supply. Ethanol makes gasoline costlier and dirtier, increases ozone pollution, and increases the death toll from smog and air pollution. Ethanol production also results in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution. Subsidies for biofuels like ethanol are a big source of corporate welfare: “BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels… that cannot break even without government support.”
The $800 billion stimulus package is also using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. And its regulations destroy jobs in America’s export sector.
Hans Bader is Counsel for Special Projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Coming to CEI in 2003, Hans’s prior casework has included suits involving the First Amendment, federalism, and civil rights issues.
Read more here.
By Ben Lieberman, NY Post
President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.
That’s a Harvard University study’s estimate of the per-gallon price of the president’s global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.
So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?
Good question, because such measures wouldn’t do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.
The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s now-famous words, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste—and what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Obama: Using Gulf crisis to push unpopular cap-and-trade bill.
That sure was true of global-warming policy, and especially the cap-and-trade bill. Many observers thought the measure, introduced last year in the House by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was dead: The American people didn’t seem to think that the so-called global-warming crisis justified a price-hiking, job-killing, economy-crushing redesign of our energy supply amid a fragile recovery. Passing another major piece of legislation, one every bit as unpopular as ObamaCare, appeared unlikely in an election year.
So Obama and congressional proponents of cap-and-trade spent several months rebranding it—downplaying the global-warming rationale and claiming that it was really a jobs bill (the so-called green jobs were supposed to spring from the new clean-energy economy) and an energy-independence bill (that will somehow stick it to OPEC).
Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) even reportedly declined to introduce their new cap-and-trade proposal in the Senate on Earth Day, because they wanted to de-emphasize the global-warming message. Instead, Kerry called the American Power Act “a plan that creates jobs and sets us on a course toward energy independence and economic resurgence.”
But the new marketing strategy wasn’t working. Few believe the green-jobs hype—with good reason. In Spain, for example, green jobs have been an expensive bust, with each position created requiring, on average, $774,000 in government subsidies. And the logic of getting us off oil imports via a unilateral measure that punishes American coal, oil and natural gas never made any sense at all.
Now the president is repackaging cap-and-trade—again—as a long-term solution to the oil spill. But it’s the same old agenda, a huge energy tax that will raise the cost of gasoline and electricity high enough so that we’re forced to use less.
The logic linking cap-and-trade to the spill in the Gulf should frighten anyone who owns a car or truck. Such measures force up the price at the pump—Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs thinks it “may require gas prices greater than $7 a gallon by 2020” to meet Obama’s stated goal of reducing emissions 14 percent from the transportation sector.
Of course, doing so would reduce gasoline use and also raise market share for hugely expensive alternative fuels and vehicles that could never compete otherwise. Less gasoline demand means less need for drilling and thus a slightly reduced chance of a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon spill—but only slightly. Oil will still be a vital part of America’s energy mix.
Oil-spill risks should be addressed directly—such as finding out why the leak occurred and requiring new preventive measures or preparing an improved cleanup plan for the next incident. Cap-and-trade is no fix and would cause trillions of dollars in collateral economic damage along the way.
Emanuel was wrong. The administration shouldn’t view each crisis—including the oil spill—as an opportunity to be exploited, but as a problem to be addressed. And America can’t afford $7-a-gallon gas. Read more here.
Ben Lieberman is senior analyst of energy and environmental policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute.
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More European Lessons and Questions for Senator Kerry
By Chris Horner, Planet Gore
Today’s update from CCNet, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has a few headlines which leave us begging for Sen. John Kerry to provide examples of all of those successes with central planning building a “green economy” like the one he has designed on behalf of President Obama, in the form of the Kerry-Lieberman no-longer-a-global-warming-bill bill.
Solar may be a renewable technology but government subsidies to it aren’t, Europe’s solar industry is learning. - Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 18 June 2010
Germany’s support for renewable energy is “breaking” the nation’s ability to pay for power and threatens the competitiveness of electricity producers, Handelsblatt cited a former [green] industry group leader as saying. - Jeremy van Loon, Bloomberg 21 June 2010
For each photovoltaic system, the Renewable Energy Act guarantees a feed-in tariff for 20 years, which is currently six times higher than the price of conventionally generated electricity. The additional costs are passed on to all electricity consumers. According to calculations by the RWI, the net cost for all photovoltaic systems built [in Germany] between 2000 and 2010 over the respective 20-year funding period add up to 85.4 billion Euros in real terms. This value corresponds to more than one quarter of Germany’s federal budget. - Handelsblatt, 21 June 2010
As the Big Green Lie ramps up in preparation for cramming Kerry-Lieberman down in the Senate (paving the way to “conference-in” the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade in a lame-duck session, we’re hearing), remember this: When candidate and president Barack Obama told us to look at the countries he was modeling his “green economy” after, we did, and discovered they were all disasters. Now we’re told that those countries - remember, the very ones he told us to look to, because he was - are just anomalies.
So, where is that green-jobs marvel? Where do we look now? They aren’t saying. Senator Kerry, in issuing that proclamation, failed to indicate where we might find the success stories. As did the president in his address Tuesday night in which he suddenly stopped telling us where to look (even if, in effect, he told us where to go).
By Ben Geman, The Hills Energy and Environment Blog
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) on Thursday said the Senate should abandon efforts - at least for now - to pass a sweeping climate change bill and also urged adoption of his plan that would block some EPA greenhouse gas regulations for two years.
“The Senate should be focusing on the immediate issues before us - to suspend EPA action on greenhouse gas emissions, push clean coal technologies, and tackle the Gulf oil spill,” he said in a prepared statement Thursday afternoon.
“We need to set aside controversial and more far-reaching climate proposals and work right now on energy legislation that protects our economy, protects West Virginia and improves our environment,” added Rockefeller, an ally of the his home state’s coal industry.
Rockefeller’s office circulated the comment Thursday afternoon, following a meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus on energy legislation.
It notes that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to allow a vote this year on Rockefeller’s bill that would delay EPA regulation of carbon emissions from power plants and other stationary sources for two years.
“This bill is needed as soon as possible - not only to guarantee that Congress, rather than an unelected regulatory agency, sets our national energy policy, but also to make sure that in this very fragile economic recovery, our manufacturing and energy sectors are able to grow and create jobs,” Rockefeller said.
A Reid aide confirms that Rockefeller’s plan “is on a list of items that we will try to consider this year.”
The caucus meeting featured presentations by sponsors of various energy and climate change plans, including Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who are touting separate proposals to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
But the opposition of Rockefeller - who chairs the Commerce Committee - to taking up broad global warming legislation could be a blow to the climate proposals.
The meeting yielded no apparent decisions about the shape of the “clean energy” bill that Reid intends to bring to the floor this summer, and further caucus talks are planned. Reid, in particular, did not say whether the plan would include provisions to limit greenhouse gases.
But Kerry warned against viewing Reid’s lack of commitment to carbon provisions as a blow to his effort to advance climate legislation. Kerry authored a broad climate and energy bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) that they pitched to the caucus Thursday.
“We first need to allow senators to weigh in and have a chance to address concerns and see where the balance of sentiment is in the caucus,” Kerry told reporters after the caucus meeting.
“That’s the normal process here. I would not read anything into that except his [Reid’s] respect for those senators and for that process,” Kerry added. Read more here.
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Boxer Declares Climate Change as the Greatest Threat, But Opponents Slam Theory
Terrorism. Nuclear weapons. Corrupt and oppressive regimes.
Sen. Barbara Boxer said last week that climate change—not any of that other stuff—will stand as the “leading cause of conflict” over the next two decades. The comment was apparently based on reports and studies over the past few years that have linked climate change to other security issues, but her colleagues—as well as her Senate campaign opponent—described the prediction as a big stretch.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Boxer’s Republican counterpart on the environment committee she chairs and arguably the most outspoken global warming skeptic in Congress, decried the warning on Tuesday as a bogus ploy to win support for a sweeping energy regulation bill.
“We know global warming alarmists frequently use scare tactics to push the U.S. to pass costly cap-and-trade legislation. But to say that carbon emissions will be the leading cause of conflict in the next 20 years represents a new low in alarmist propaganda,” Inhofe, ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a written statement to FoxNews.com.
“Given the tremendous security challenges confronting our nation today—from Iran, North Korea, Islamic extremism and much else—Senator Boxer’s statement seems a bit out of touch. I would hope that she simply misspoke.”
The chairwoman of the EPW committee made the remark on the floor last Thursday, when the Senate was taking up a challenge to the Obama administration’s EPA rules that would cut greenhouse gas emissions. Democrats succeeded in stopping the Republican-led resolution, with the help of senators like Boxer.
On the floor, she warned that climate change would have far-reaching consequences in the not-so-distant future.
“I’m going to put in the record ... a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be over the next 20 years the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm’s way,” Boxer said. “And that’s why we have so many returning veterans who want us to move forward and address this issue.”
According to Boxer’s office, the senator believes climate change will be “one of the” leading causes of conflict—not necessarily the primary cause—despite her statement on the floor last Thursday. It’s unclear whether Boxer simply misspoke or whether she was intentionally escalating her warning.
Boxer’s office backed up her statement afterward by pointing to a Pentagon report that discussed the security implications of climate change; the creation by the CIA of a Center on Climate Change and National Security; and a statement from 33 retired generals and other high-ranking military officials saying climate change is “making the world a more dangerous place.”
But the recent studies and statements on the connection between climate change and other problems generally do not conclude that the issue will drive all-out chaos on a global scale.
Rather, they say climate change has the potential to exacerbate existing problems like poverty and droughts and social tensions.
That was the conclusion reached by a National Intelligence Assessment in 2008 that found climate change could lead to food and water shortages, among other problems, and in turn fuel conflict.
“Climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems,” then-National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar said in a statement to Congress. Fingar said the problems would hit poor, developing countries hardest leading to pressure on the U.S. military to respond, but that the United States might actually “benefit slightly” from climate change over the next few decades because of “increased agricultural yields.”
The Pentagon’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review also concluded that climate change would contribute to “food and water scarcity” and could worsen “mass migration.” The report said that “climate change alone does not cause conflict,” though it “may act as an accelerant” of instability.
Even that conclusion has been called into question by experts who say the theory lets bad governments and bad leaders off the hook by blaming future problems on climate.
Idean Salehyan, a University of North Texas professor who co-authored a book on this subject, wrote a column in 2007, when the theory started to gain traction, in which he called predictions of “apocalyptic” consequences from climate change “misleading” and “irresponsible.”
“They shift liability for wars and human rights abuses away from oppressive, corrupt governments,” he wrote. Salehyan could not be reached for comment for this article.
The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano testified last year before Boxer’s committee that political violence has actually dropped as emissions have risen.
“The environment does not cause wars—it is how humans respond to their environment that causes conflicts. Climate change does not necessarily ensure that there will be more or less conflict,” he said.
The campaign of Boxer’s Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina, cited Carafano’s testimony and others in criticizing the senator’s claim from last week.
“We can all agree that terrorists pose a serious security threat to our nation. However, there is wide disagreement within the security community, and the American people, about the role climate change plays in global security. Despite this, Barbara Boxer has chosen to fight for cap-and-trade legislation under the auspices that somehow raising energy prices and costing America jobs will make us safer,” Fiorina spokeswoman Amy Thoma said in a written statement to FoxNews.com.
Robert Dillon, spokesman for EPW committee member Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Boxer was “overstating” the problem. He said Democrats have been employing a lot of “hype” to try building support for the stalled cap-and-trade energy bill. Murkowski sponsored the EPA challenge that was defeated last week.
“I think we all understand that climate change adds to those issues [detailed in the studies],” Dillon said. “What made Senator Boxer make that leap? ... I have no idea.” See report here.